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Artist Statement

I am attracted to interactive media as both an art and communication medium. I like things that blur the line between creative disciplines, between art and technology, and between physical and mediated experience. I see interactive media arts as a kind of collaboration between the artist, the medium (the computer), and the audience (the user), none of which are controlling. I view my role as framing the experience: defining its limits and parameters and finely crafting the semantics of the system. I utilize the computer as an active medium, exploiting its possibilities for the retrieval, processing, and manipulation of data/media in real time as well as for the introduction of iterative dependencies and variability. However, the final manifestation of a project is largely the result of user interactions. Boundaries between the observer and the observed collapse as viewers become players, participants, and co-authors in experiences that are uniquely their own.

I am interested in generative and reactive art that creates itself in real time based on user interaction. Generative art making is tied to complexity theory as there is often a large number of interacting parts that self-organize without any one thing (or person) being in absolute control. They exhibit emergent, adaptive, and dynamic (ever-changing) properties. Often, generative art embraces randomness and chaos as organizing principles. Any complex system will have elements of both order and disorder. Such complexity is also how nature creates itself on every scale, from the snowflake to the snowstorm. I am fascinated by the beauty and mystery that emerges as the unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together.

Conceptually, much of my work focuses on how identity is shaped by our hyper-mediated, consumer-oriented culture. I explore how media not only reflects, but also engenders and reinforces social and cultural ideologies. I examine my own relationship with screen-based media and the interfaces of my machines. These interfaces are representational systems that frame my interactions with digital media, and in so doing impose ways of seeing and thinking about the media I consume. I recognize that everything captured is reduced and the process of digitization is also inevitably a process of abstraction. I am concerned with the ramifications of virtuality and the growing influence of mediated experience over direct physical experience, and play with notions of physicality and virtuality in my work. Furthermore, I am fascinated by the elasticity of image and its reductionist power. I am concerned with issues related to media ownership and diversity (the corporate consolidation of media); the gatekeeping, agenda setting, and frame setting functions of media; and how media function as forces of social and cultural production. I am particularly interested in the special authority and power of television, including its voyeuristic (I can see without being seen); fetishistic (I develop para-social relationships with important and interesting people); and narcissistic (I see myself reflected in what I watch) qualities. Drawing from cultivation theory, I am interested in notions of multiplicity and fragmentation; how the repetition of mass-produced images and messages passively cultivate perceptions of reality and aggregate into the formation of belief systems and social and cultural attitudes.